The Women’s March Doesn’t Get to Decide Who the ‘White Jews’ Are

Growing up a mixed-race Jewish girl in 1980s New Jersey, I know I would have found the newly announced Jewish board members of the Women’s March—scholar Yavilah McCoy, a black Orthodox Jew from a convert family; April Baskin, an ambassador for multiracial Jews; and transgender activist raised Hasidic Jew Abby Stein—a thrilling validation.

It surely would have been for my mother, the only black mom at my shul and a lapsed Catholic who dutifully made hand-grated latkes from her mother-in-law’s recipe while Jewish moms shamelessly brought in Ore-Ida. It would have been, I hope, to our temple’s music director, who could only come out by dying of AIDS. And, as the girl who couldn’t find a salon to style my frizzy, intolerably multiracial hair for my bat mitzvah, I would have known I wasn’t alone.

But when I got the email announcing the three leaders, I couldn’t enjoy the moment at all. Despite calls for unity, even leaning into the chaos, all I see is another dig by the Women’s March at those pesky Jewish feminists who happen to be white.

For those who haven’t been following, three of the public faces of the Women’s March—organizers Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez—have had close ties to the Nation of Islam, and its nutty, virulently anti-Semitic leader Louis Farrakhan. But the animus of the leaders, it turns out, is not only for Jews, but, in particular, white Jewish women. (Bob Bland, a white woman who is not Jewish, has long been a public face of the March.) As a recent Tablet article detailed, this was not a coincidence.

At the first planning meeting, Mallory and Perez assailed another organizer, Vanessa Wruble, with the debunked myths Farrakhan peddles about America’s white Jews being responsible for slavery and holding all the wealth. Since then, Mallory has denied the incident, but refused to disavow the Nation of Islam leader, even going so far to suggest that white Jews—that’s her construction, not mine—“uphold white supremacy.” I never thought anyone could make me long for the kind of anti-Semite who just wants to talk about Israel.

Look at the appointment of McCoy, Baskin, and Stein, and it at first seems like a deft political move. Comment on white Jewish women’s absence from the line-up, and the Women’s March can respond, Why? Are you saying these aren’t real Jews? You white women were racist after all.

But it’s not really that deft, because it’s white Jewish women Mallory, Sarsour, and Perez have been assailing, without cause, all along—wielding that noxious designation, the “white Jew.”

First of all, “white Jew” is a nonsense term. It’s certainly not how Jews think of themselves, or each other. This is not to say we don’t have a long and active practice of enforcing our own ethnic hierarchies and declaring who is or is not a Jew. German Jews who came to New York in the 1800s scorned the next waves of immigrant Eastern European Jews of the shtetl who came to the Lower East Side. Israelis claimed Ethiopian Jews were not really Jewish. People without Jewish mothers are not Jews; people who eat pork are not Jews; Jews who only go to services on the High Holy Days are not Jews. My mother is black, I don’t believe in God, and we had a Christmas tree. Look: I just disqualified myself to half of the chosen people.

But “white Jew” has found a foothold, I think, in my generation because it’s Jews who don’t look what we like to think of as “Jewish” who have suffered the most. Hollywood has a vision of what a Jewish woman looks like, and she’s somewhere between Golda Meir and Barbra Streisand. (Don’t get me wrong, the real stars hid that they were Jewish.) Because our generation is proudly multiracial and LGBTQ, when we are rejected, it’s along those lines.

And that means we have been tokenized, fetishized, challenged, excluded. Angela Warnick Buchdahl, the first Korean-American rabbi at New York’s Central Synagogue, has spoken eloquently on practicing Judaism while looking Korean. When, after a Birthright trip to Israel, a teacher told her he only taught Torah to Jews, she almost decided to leave the faith entirely. “I don’t have a Jewish face, I don’t have a Jewish name,” she told her mother. “I could just disappear as a Jew and no one would know the difference.” “Is that even possible?” Her mother asked.

The message? We Jews are family. And, like all families, we can torment each other however we want. But Mallory, Sarsour, and Perez, and Women’s March Inc. are not Jewish—and I’m pretty sure they didn’t agonize about the struggles of multiracial, multiethnic, LGBTQ Jews before last month.

By leaving out white Jewish women, the Women’s March is suggesting that, to be a full fledged member of their movement, you have to possess some other virtue that makes your progressive creds legit. This is a profound insult to the new board members, who deserve more than to be props in some hasty stab at intersectionality. And it’s an insult to white Jewish women, who should never have been singled out in the first place.

For the organizers, these new board members might function as a gentle corrective: Jewish women finally worthy of the feminist, progressive stamp. But note to the Women’s March: You don’t get to say who’s a feminist. And we certainly don’t need you to tell us who’s a Jew.

Lizzie Skurnick, the editor-in-chief of Lizzie Skurnick Books, writes the New York Times Magazine's "That Should Be a Word" column, and is a frequent contributor to NPR's All Things Considered.

WAIT, WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY TO COMMENT?
Tablet is committed to bringing you the best, smartest, most enlightening and entertaining reporting and writing on Jewish life, all free of charge. We take pride in our community of readers, and are thrilled that you choose to engage with us in a way that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, allowing vocal—and, often, anonymous—minorities to drag it down with invective (and worse). Starting today, then, we are asking people who'd like to post comments on the site to pay a nominal fee—less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place.

I NEED TO BE HEARD! BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY.
Readers can still interact with us free of charge via Facebook, Twitter, and our other social media channels, or write to us at letters@tabletmag.com. Each week, we’ll select the best letters and publish them in a new letters to the editor feature on the Scroll.

We hope this new largely symbolic measure will help us create a more pleasant and cultivated environment for all of our readers, and, as always, we thank you deeply for your support.

Shabbat Shalom. Please know that since 2017, the mid-January women’s marches are chiefly locally organized events with their own leaders and boards in some cases. Most–and from research I have done almost all in the Northeast–are unaffiliated with D.C. group, making a point this year on their web pages to disavow them and their anti-Semitism.
Sarsour, Mallory and Perez are only so called women’s march leaders because the media has chosen them to be in this era of “truthiness”.
The media has not done due diligence research for the truth about the grassroots leadership that created the never seen before outpouring of millions of men and women all over the world against Trump, his cronies and all they have done and all they represent. Instead media folks have created false icons of these three not elected by anyone to be anything to cast black shadows on the women’s marches all over the world. This is something Putin would love, wouldn’t he?

Lynne Shapirosays:

January 18, 2019 - 5:10 pm

I should add that researchers who work to find all the facts about the predominating local independent women’s march organizations can be confused this year. The D.C. group with its Mallory, Sarsour and now Perez has been posting Eventbrite events for their own local marches (characterized by Women’s Wave) and even have organized a Union Square march this year in NYC to compromise the effectiveness of the locally organized march starting at Columbus Circle that disavowed any affiliation with the D.C. group.
It takes a little work to sort all the facts out, but the local hard working volunteer locally based women’s march organizers– who will show with thousands on the streets tomorrow that Trump and Putin will not prevail– deserve these best efforts to recognize them.

Name (required)Email (required, will not be published)Website (optional)

Message

2000

Your comment may be no longer than 2,000 characters, approximately 400 words. HTML tags are not permitted, nor are more than two URLs per comment. We reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.